[RndTbl] Linux "parent ready"?

Mark Jenkins mark at parit.ca
Wed Feb 12 15:07:08 CST 2014


On 12/02/14 05:13 AM, Trevor Cordes wrote:
> Faced with an expiring XP, I had a thought about moving my mother
> (complete techno-luddite) to Linux.

My dad meets that description (minus the mom part, hence subject line 
change) and has been using Debian and Ubuntu for around 8 years now.

He now has way more cumulative time on this (web, email, spreadsheet) 
then the small amount of intro to computer course work he got under 
Windows first -- it was too little exposure to get him hooked. This is 
all he's known in retirement time where almost daily computer use has 
been picked up as a habit and wasn't a computer user at all pre-retirement.

And no, I do not have a tech support burden.

It's easy to please a user with really simple needs. And they'll be 
thankful for system reliability if they know anything about other 
people's horrors.

You're doing them a favour by not giving them the ability to click their 
way to installing something from hell. If they ask for some little app 
they found on the web, don't try to make some little app work with Wine, 
just say "no, live without it".

And if using Windows they should definitely be taken away from admin 
privileges to an unprivileged account and instructed to get advice 
before flipping to admin account before installing anything.
(this is good advice for everyone!)

Even legit software like Oracle Java for Windows comes with freaking 
unneeded toolbar installers to opt out of during the install process! 
Somebody needs to pay attention and not just click, click, click...!

Speaking of reliability, I don't recommend Ubuntu's regular 6 month 
releases, every major upgrade on any platform has snafus, the 
availability of LTS every two years is the way to go. Ditto, don't do 
Fedora, just don't.


Advanced users are obviously in heaven in the free world.


Intermediate users like my Mom, who's been a Mac user since before the 
turn of the century and an Amiga before that are a much harder sell. The 
big fuzzy middle users in computing are always pushing the boundaries of 
what their computer can do, but from a consumer perspective that expects 
things to "just work".
(every advanced user, regardless of platform is someone who deals 
regularly with things that don't "just work" and require an operator to 
handle them properly. Some of us even have jobs doing this)

And these intermediates are naturally the target market for developers 
of non-commodity applications.
(Bookkeeping, yes, being an issue for many, though I like GnuCash 
myself. Tax processing not so much now an issue now as there are now 
plenty of web-based services for that. This is what my parents use 
without any help from me)

I suppose world domination has to come from the edges inward.

Which reminds me:

There's a lot to not like about Android from a freedom perspective, but 
if we're talking moms and dads using an invisible kernel named Linux, 
it's a pretty big success with over 1 billion activations world wide. 
(not sure how many of them are >60)

Of course, we're not really talking about "Linux" or Android here, we're 
talking about GNU/Linux distros like Ubuntu as a desktop OS choice.

Maybe world domination of such users some day will be Replicant (free 
Android) X86-64 attached to big monitor, keyboard, mouse, CPU, and 
plenty of RAM.
(long live the desktop computer! Especially for parents with poor vision 
and no desire to get gorilla arm using a touch screen for hours of 
browsing pleasure


Mark

p.s.
Gorilla arm

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html
gorilla arm: n.
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input 
technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the 
designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that 
humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making 
small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to 
feel sore, cramped, and oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla 
while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now 
considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; 
“Remember the gorilla arm!” is shorthand for “How is this going to fly 
in real use?”.



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